3 Ways to be a Happy Enterprise Architect

When doing Enterprise Architecture, you should always have a specific business value in mind to provide to stakeholders and business management. If you fail to show it, you risk losing support or budget for you and your team. Find out what you can do to be a happy Enterprise Architect with some tips we have gathered for you below.

Provide Value That Key Stakeholders Will Understand

As an Enterprise Architect, you are not the end-user. Someone will always have something to say about your work and judge what you're doing. To you, it might make complete architectural sense what you're doing, but if you can't sell its value to your organization – you're done. Stakeholders will not understand it and will not sign it off; and remember, they are the ones who will ultimately decide whether you were successful or not.

To avoid confusion and keep stakeholders satisfied, you should deliver value to them often. Show them your progress. (One way of doing this is using Designer's Presentation Mode.) Then, tell them how satisfied you are with the results. But don't forget to do that in terms that they will understand.

Try your best to get the Marketing team on your side. Get skillful people who will help you communicate your value via various internal and external marketing campaigns. But again, the value of Enterprise Architecture should always be expressed in layman's terms.

Deliver Value Often

Deliver value to stakeholders early and often. Show progress of your work that is relevant to them. Ideally, it should be one of the targets they need to achieve for the year. If you do that, even though they might not understand Enterprise Architecture, they will appreciate the value that you and your team are bringing in. This way, they trust that what you do is to support them, and they will advocate for you within the organization in the long run.

Publish your results regularly and include key stakeholders' names as well. Doing this will make them engaged and feel involved in your work. And ultimately, it will help you move forward in your organization.

Tip: You can deliver value through heated maps, landscape diagrams, capability maps, network diagrams, business models, and more by using a single source of truth – Designer.

Align What You’re Doing With Business Requirements

Do not architect just for the sake of architecting. Don't do this because you will only end up having to waste time trying to clean up the mess and organizing all this unstructured data will take ages.

When collecting data, always have the business value and stakeholders in mind. These two things should be your guiding light when collecting your data. (As a bonus, you can learn why collecting data has no value in our 5-minute video here.)

The above text was taken from our webinar "Enterprise Architecture: The Path to Success on your Journey". To watch the full webinar, click below:

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